The woody scent filled Shilla's nostrils and brought painfully incongruous images of cozy fireplaces to her mind. Wearily she shoved a gray-edged wisp of brown hair out of her eyes and watched as the road she and the other pathmasters had struggled to keep open burst into an arch of flame. The fire had taken less than an hour to overcome their efforts to hold it at bay. Sudden screams from a panicky horse jerked her attention down the street. A woman, caught beneath the roaring flames, hacked the horse loose from the cart bearing her goods and frantically tugged him toward the safety at the end of the street, protecting her face with her sleeve as she ran. Shilla wondered if there were any others trapped behind the cart which quickly became one with the orange around it. She did not reach with her mind to find out. She had felt death too often recently to knowingly seek more. Her dry eyes no longer had tears to shed; they ached with the grit of the windborne ashes and the heat of the flames. And the inside of her head ached with the use of her pathways; it was as if fire traced along them, too.

"What now?" Terel asked hoarsely.

"The next main avenue is Buryrow. We'll try to keep that open as long as we can," Shilla replied. She turned and hurried up the river. Her boots squelched in the layer of mud that lay on the cobblestone path. The bucket brigades had moved farther upriver already, but the signs of their futile efforts still marked the riverside path that blessedly remained free of the fire. Stone warehouses, built to withstand the damp and tides of the river, also withstood fire.

Not so the wharves at the mouth of the river. On them barrels of pitch and lamp oil sent beacons of light flaring into the sky. It wasn't difficult to see where you were going even though it was the middle of the night. The city made quite a splendid, if expensive, taper. The corner of Shilla's mouth crooked a little at the thought. Humor did not come easily to her these days, and when it did, it was usually black.

She was so tired. She had been up the night before, again, trying to save the life of a child stricken with the fever that had been plaguing the drought-stricken city. It seemed as if she had not had a night of unbroken sleep in months. Near dawn she had finally eased the child into a natural sleep and left with but one thought on her mind: to crawl into bed and dream of a life free of fevers and drought and loss. But when she had slipped out into the narrow roadway under the garrets of the house she had attended, she had been greeted with a sky lit with more than dawn. And now, eighteen hours later, the fire was still raging.